After former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden massively increased access to food stamps, President Donald Trump’s reforms in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act are working to cut back the bloat. States have reportedly reduced food stamp rolls by 3.5 million people since the bill became law. Government spending is thus being cut, reducing deficits and increasing independence as more Americans get off the couch and back into the labor force. These are welcome developments that future administrations should preserve.
Before Obama, participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as food stamps, fluctuated with the economy, rising during recessions and falling during expansions, but never rising much higher than 10% of the population.
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That changed with Obama’s 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which increased food stamp benefit levels and expanded eligibility to jobless adults without children. Food stamps were seen by the Left and the ruling Democrats as a way of getting around welfare reforms they hated and which had been signed into law in 1996 by President Bill Clinton. Participation skyrocketed under Obama, rising well past the end of the Great Recession in 2009 before peaking in 2013 at almost 48 million recipients, or 15% of the population.
The first Trump administration cracked down on state waivers that allowed able-bodied adults to stay on food stamps, and participation fell to 36 million people in 2019. But federal courts eventually blocked those reforms and Biden abandoned them.
The Biden administration not only allowed states to ignore the law’s eligibility restrictions but also illegally rewrote the benefits formula to boost benefits by hundreds of billions of dollars. As a direct result, food stamp rolls steadily increased again, peaking above 42 million in 2023.
Trump’s 2025 OBBBA succeeded legislatively where his first-term regulatory efforts had faltered. Under OBBBA, able-bodied adults ages 18 to 64 without children must work or participate in a job-training program for at least 80 hours a month to stay eligible. In addition, OBBBA cut benefits off for most immigrants, including refugees, asylees, and millions of undocumented immigrants Biden granted status through his illegal parole programs. Food stamp rolls have been declining steadily ever since.
Since OBBBA became law in July 2025, food stamp participation has fallen by 3.5 million. The data only go through January 2026. By the time July data come in, the reduction in food stamp dependence could be historic. Some states, including Arizona, have seen the number of food stamp participants fall by half.
For Democrats, these numbers are a catastrophe. The Democratic Party exists to get as much of the public hooked on government benefits as possible and keep them there forever. That is why so many Democrats felt betrayed by Clinton’s reforms, which applied work requirements to what had been called Aid to Families with Dependent Children and renamed it Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Democrats were never able to undo Clinton’s work requirements, but Obama was able to greatly expand the food stamp program, drawing millions of U.S. families into the cycle of dependence that welfare reform was designed to disrupt.
Trump’s food stamp reforms are proving that dependency is a policy choice, not an economic inevitability. Work requirements and eligibility rules protect taxpayers, encourage employment, and reserve aid for the truly needy. Future administrations should build on this success, not revive the Obama-Biden dependency machine that OBBBA finally began dismantling.
